Don’t Be Fooled: The White House Is Still Stonewalling Fast & Furious

The White House has been stonewalling investigators for four years over the Obama Administration’s Operation Fast and Furious. Fast and Furious was gun-smuggling plot that armed the Sinaloa drug cartel with thousands of weapons in an apparent attempt to scapegoat American gun dealers in border states for drug cartel violence in Mexico.

Four years after asserting executive privilege to block Congress from obtaining documents relating to a controversial federal gun trafficking investigation, President Barack Obama relented Friday, turning over to lawmakers thousands of pages of records that led to unusual House votes holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt in 2012.

In January, a federal district court judge rejected Obama’s executive privilege claim over records detailing the Justice Department and White House’s response to Operation Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigation that may have allowed as many as 2,000 firearms to pass into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not turn down Obama’s privilege assertion on the merits. Instead, she said authorized public disclosures about the operation in a Justice Department inspector general report essentially mooted the administration’s drive to keep the records secret.

Tellingly, the Obama Administration has only turned over some of the requested documentation. The White House is still withholding an undisclosed number of documents, presumably including those which might explain why low-level ATF field agents in Arizona were in direct communication with the White House.

There has long been speculation that Operation Fast and Furious, one of up to ten gun-walking operations in states along the southern border, was an attempt to add material support to the Obama Administration’s so called “90-percent lie.” Soon after taking office, President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed the blatant falsehood that 90-percent of the guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico came from gun dealers in the United States. The reality was that only 8-percent were traced to American gun dealers.

The guns that Obama’s ATF smuggled across the border were primarily semi-automatic rifles, 5.7x28mm pistols, and .50 BMG rifles. These are the exact same kind of firearms that he and Attorney General Eric Holder had stated on numerous occasions that they would like to make illegal. Was Fast and Furious nothing more or less attempt to smuggle guns into Mexico to inflate gun trace data and violence, in a bloody attempt to create conditions justifying an “assault weapon” ban?

You can be sure that we’ll never know.

What we do know is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have been part of conversations about the gun-walking plot, and that the mainstream media is no more interested in finding out about her role in a scheme that has left hundreds of people dead on both sides of the border than they have been about her breaches in national data security which are clearly criminal.